Rakudo Star Release 2014.09

2014-09-26

A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
announce the September 2014 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the September 2014 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.
Windows .MSI versions of Rakudo star for the MoarVM and Parrot backend
are also avaiable in the downloads area.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM
backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with
experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail).
Two shipped modules are known to fail on Parrot (JSON::RPC and p6doc).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as
"Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes release 2014.09 of the
Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 6.7.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, version 2014.09 of MoarVM, plus various modules,
documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6
community.

Some of the new features added to this release include:

panda (the module installer client) does work on windows again

panda knows about all modules, that are shipped with this release

./perl6 --profile for MoarVM

Workaround OS X make bug for MoarVM

support for submethod DESTROY (MoarVM only)

optimizations to Str.words, Str.lines, IO.lines, chomp, and return

added experimental support for Proc::Async, MoarVM only for now

Reduced memory size of CORE.setting, improved startup time

startup (on Moar) 15% faster than p5 w/ Moose

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many
that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.